About 10 months ago, it came to my attention that there was a fundamental problem related to Azure AD and applications.

This was a surprise to me–I had cheered on the product team manifesto that applications were first-class citizens in Azure AD.

Since then, I’ve been on a journey of discovery and advocacy. My journey eventually led me to talking with several PMs on the Azure AD product team.

I’ve learned that there is a lot about Azure AD applications and the AAD settings governing them that is poorly documented. I’ve encouraged the product team to fill the documentation gap, and amend the design to provide the right access controls. That journey still continues, and I’m here now to share what I know.

First, I’ll call your attention to the published documentation and relevant links related to the topic of AAD and applications.

The Application object vs. ServicePrincipal document is important in that provides some key understanding if you want to go about identifying all the applications in your AAD tenant. You won’t find all of your AAD applications in *any* of the GUI interfaces, such as the Azure Management Portal or the AAD Access Panel. This omission of some AAD applications in the GUI interfaces is unfortunate because it makes it harder to understand what’s really going on specific to your tenant. You can use the MSOnline Powershell module or the AAD Graph API to discover all of your AAD applications.

The Consent framework document is useful, but it’s one of the documents which is flawed in my opinion–it is incredibly misleading about reality. The reality is that only a fraction of your AAD apps allow user consent–all the others *assume* that the user consent is unnecessary. To my way of thinking, this is a significant design flaw, and the documentation isn’t doing anyone favors by not pointing out that not all apps are subject to user consent.

This brings me to the heart of the new information I have to share. The first link above likely isn’t known to you–it reveals some behind-the-scenes details that aren’t revealed elsewhere, and documents published in that platform are harder to find for some reason. Note that every AAD application has a “home” tenant. Some are enabled for multiple tenancy and some aren’t.

Note that some applications are “curated” by Microsoft–these are the pre-integrated applications in the Azure AD App Gallery. These pre-integrated applications live in a special tenant that Microsoft owns/runs.

Note that there are some applications “owned” by Microsoft–these are applications like Sharepoint Online. It turns out that these applications are “special” in that they are automatically deployed to *every* AAD tenant without any explicit acceptance on your part.

And then there are the applications that anyone might create/develop. These applications fall into two sub-categories:

Those that are only in your tenant–one of your users adds them. Microsoft sometimes uses the code words “line of business” apps to refer to these.

Those which live in some other tenant and have been added to work with your tenant. Microsoft has two different nicknames for these: consented apps or multi-tenant apps.

It turns out that the only type of AAD app which permits user consent are that sub-category with the consented app nickname.

Down below is a handy reference table I put together while interacting with the AAD PMs that own each of these different AAD app categories that includes all of these details.

Moving beyond the documentation gap and the user consent design flaw, there are several other fundamental problems.

One problem I implied above–that Microsoft can deploy applications to your tenant without notice or consent. I think this assumption on Microsoft’s part is very problematic and I’d encourage them to rethink it and provide enterprise controls for each app they would like to deploy. This is problematic because it violates the design principle that we own our Azure properties. I do not want Bing for Business published to my users–or the latest app that Microsoft has created but which has no HIPAA and BAA agreement. Putting such an application in front of my users will lead to regulatory problems, and is a significant deal breaker. Microsoft’s hubris in thinking they know my environment or that they can use a captive audience to instantly gain market share for their latest creation is ultimately not good for their long-term business relationship with their customer. They need to provide a control here.

Another is in the lack of controls Microsoft has provided around application permissions. OAuth is really cool–it is the protocol Microsoft has adopted that allows one application to be given permissions to another. But Microsoft hasn’t provided the right controls to manage these permissions. Here’s how things work: a developer somewhere writes an application. That developer decides which application permissions their application needs. That developer publishes their application so it is multiple tenant aware. Someone in your tenant comes along and decides to add that application. In the current state, that decision to add the application is an acceptance that the application permissions are acceptable. For many of the types of AAD applications, the person adding the application has no understanding of the implications nor responsibility in your organization for the consequences. A better design would involve a workflow where individuals with specific roles had to approve any application that asked for certain application permissions. Global admins should be required to approve any application that requires the ability to query AAD. Exchange Online admins should be required to approve any application that requires the ability to query Exchange Online. And so on. In the absence of this kind of design, Microsoft needs a stop-gap where it notifies global admins that an application has been added which grants permissions to high-value and high-risk applications like AAD and the set of O365 applications.

Another problem in this area is the poor presentation and documentation specific to the AAD tenant application settings. The Configure tab in the AAD section of the Azure Management Portal has two settings under an “integrated applications” heading.

The names of these settings imply something very different from reality. If you set the first one to yes, you’d think that users can consent to all applications now. And if you set the second one to no, you’d think that no users can add applications. In both cases, you’d be wrong. What’s worse is that if you try to educate yourself by following the help link for these settings, you are sent to a useless AAD product “marketing” page which doesn’t tell you anything about Azure AD applications at all. Of course, there is no Microsoft documentation which informs you that what these settings claim to do isn’t really possible.

To the best of my knowledge, here is what those two settings really mean:

Users may give applications permission to access their data

If the AAD app is a multi-tenant application which is neither a Microsoft nor AAD App Gallery application, then user consent to access their data is possible with that application . The data might be in any number of other AAD applications, including Azure AD itself.

Note that some applications have no user consent or explicit admin consent whatsoever.

Users may add integrated applications

If this setting is yes, then any user in your tenant can add a developed application whether it is a consented/multi-tenant application or a “line of business”/single tenant application. If this setting is no, then only global admins can add these kinds of applications.

Note that if users can add applications, there is no enterprise controls for which data a given application can access. The only control in this case is the user.